Is the United States Becoming and Oligarchy?

While the United States still has the political trappings of a democracy, economically, it seems rapidly headed toward becoming an oligarchy where wealth and power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the few.  Not since the Gilded Age have we seen such extremes in wealth and and such concentrated attacks on safety and environmental protection regulations. Such attacks are, of course are motivated so that the few can amass even more wealth even as average citizens suffer physically and economically. As a column in the New York Times notes, this is NOT the model that the Founding Fathers envisioned.  Instead, they favored a political and economic system where "the greatest happiness of the greatest Number is the point to be obtained."  This concept could not be further than the model pushed by the Trump/Pence regime and today's GOP which favors the few over the many.   To win in November, 2020 - and November 2019 here in Virginia - Democrats need to push the vision of the Founders and rebut Trump's efforts to label them all as socialists (except Bernie Sanders, who outright states he's a socialist).  Here are column excerpts:

Pete Buttigieg, who’s shown an impressive knack for putting matters well in these early days of the 2020 presidential race, nailed it recently when Chuck Todd of NBC asked him about capitalism. Of course I’m a capitalist, he said; America “is a capitalist society.”

But, he continued: “It’s got to be democratic capitalism.”

Mr. Buttigieg said that when capitalism becomes unrestrained by democratic checks and impulses, that’s no longer the kind of capitalism that once produced broad prosperity in this country. “If you want to see what happens when you have capitalism without democracy, you can see it very clearly in Russia,” he said. “It turns into crony capitalism, and that turns into oligarchy.”

[H]is rhetoric reminds us of a crucial point: There is, or should be, a democratic element to capitalism — and an economic element to how we define democracy.

After all, oligarchy does have an economic element to it; in fact, it is explicitly economic. Oligarchy is the rule of the few, and these few have been understood since Aristotle’s time to be men of wealth, property, nobility, what have you.

But somehow, as the definition of democracy has been handed down to us over the years, the word has come to mean the existence and exercise of a few basic rights and principles. The people — the “demos” — are imbued with no particular economic characteristic. This is wrong. Our definition of democracy needs to change.

Democracy can’t flourish in a context of grotesque concentration of wealth. This idea is neither new nor radical nor alien. It is old, mainstream and as American as Thomas Jefferson.

I invoke Jefferson for a reason. Everyone knows how he was occupying his time in the summer of 1776; he was writing the Declaration of Independence. But what was he up to that fall? He was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, and he was taking the lead in writing and sponsoring legislation to abolish the commonwealth’s laws upholding “entail” (which kept large estates within families across generations) and primogeniture.
He believed, as the founders did generally, that excess inherited wealth was fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

They were most concerned with inherited wealth, as was the Scottish economist Adam Smith, whom conservatives invoke constantly today but who would in fact be appalled by the propagandistic phrase “death tax” — in their time, inherited wealth was the oppressive economic problem.

They saw clearly the link between democratic health and general economic prosperity. Here is John Adams, not exactly Jefferson’s best friend: All elements of society, he once wrote, must “cooperate in this one democratical principle, that the end of all government is the happiness of the People: and in this other, that the greatest happiness of the greatest Number is the point to be obtained.” “Happiness” to the founders meant economic well-being, and note that Adams called it “democratical.”

So, yes, democracy and the kind of economic inequality we’ve seen in this country in recent decades don’t mix.

A number of scholars have made these arguments in recent years, notably Ganesh Sitaraman in his book “The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution.” All that work has been vitally important. But now that some politicians are saying it, we can finally have the broad national conversation we’ve desperately needed for years.

Bernie Sanders has proposed an inheritance tax that the founders would love, and Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax of which they’d surely approve. But you don’t have to be a supporter of either of those candidates or their plans to get behind the general idea that great concentration of wealth is undemocratic.

Policies built around this idea will not turn America into the Soviet Union or, in the au courant formulation, Venezuela. They will make it the nation the founders intended. And this, as Mr. Buttigieg’s words suggest, is how Democratic candidates should answer the socialism question (with the apparent exception of the socialist Mr. Sanders). No, I’m a capitalist. And that’s why I want capitalism to change.

House GOP Seeks to Cut Medicare, Social Security to Balance Budget After Massive Tax Cuts for Wealthy

While much of the American public is focused on the horrors and deliberate cruelty taking place on America's southwest border, House Republicans are conspiring to unleash cruelty on those who rely on Medicare and Social Security to survive.  The pretense for harming countless lives?  The need to cut the federal budget deficit which is hemorrhaging red ink in the wake of the $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion with a "T") tax cuts for the very wealthy and large, rapacious corporations.  It has been Paul Ryan's sick and morally bankrupt dream to destroy the social safety net for years, and now the massive give away voted in by Republicans is being grotesquely used to harm the poor and the elderly.  While Catholic bishops are condemning the Trump/Pence family separation policy, they might also want to bar Ryan from the sacraments given his utter disregard for the poor, the hungry and the sick. Trump cruel border policy did not arise out of thin air.  The GOP has been pushing a cruel agenda for many years.   A piece in the Washington Post looks ate the GOP's manufactured crisis and those whom they seek to harm.  Here are excerpts:

House Republicans released a proposal Tuesday that would balance the budget in nine years — but only by making large cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicare and Social Security, . . . .

The House Budget Committee is aiming to pass the blueprint this week, but that may be as far as it goes this midterm election year. It is not clear that GOP leaders will put the document on the House floor for a vote, and even if it were to pass the House, the budget would have little impact on actual spending levels.

Nonetheless the budget serves as an expression of Republicans’ priorities at a time of rapidly rising deficits and debt. Although the nation’s growing indebtedness has been exacerbated by the GOP’s own policy decisions — including the new tax law, which most analyses say will add at least $1 trillion to the debt — Republicans on the Budget Committee said they felt a responsibility to put the nation on a sounder fiscal trajectory.

Democrats have little interest in addressing it except as part of a larger deal including tax increases — the sort of “Grand Bargain” that eluded President Barack Obama.

The House Republican budget, titled “A Brighter American Future,” would remake Medicare by giving seniors the option of enrolling in private plans that compete with traditional Medicare, a system of competition designed to keep costs down but dismissed by critics as an effort to privatize the program. Along with other changes, the budget proposes to squeeze $537 billion out of Medicare over the next decade.

The budget would transform Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for the poor, by limiting per capita payments or allowing states to turn it into a block-grant program — the same approach House Republicans took in their legislation that passed last year to repeal the Affordable Care Act (the repeal effort died in the Senate, but the GOP budget assumes that the repeal takes place).  It also proposes adding work requirements for certain adults enrolled in Medicaid. Changes to Medicaid and other health programs would account for $1.5 trillion in savings.

Social Security comes in for more modest cuts of $4 billion over the decade, which the budget projects could be reached by eliminating concurrent receipt of unemployment benefits and Social Security disability insurance. . . . And the budget proposes $230 billion in cuts from education and training programs, including consolidating student loan programs and reducing Pell Grant awards.

The budget also relies on rosy economic-growth projections . . .

Democrats were quick to criticize the GOP proposal while contending that Republicans were opening themselves up to election-year attacks by releasing it at all.

“The 2019 Republican budget scraps any sense of responsibility to the American people and any obligation to being honest,” said Rep. John Yarmuth (Ky.), the top Democrat on the Budget Committee. “Its repeal of the Affordable Care Act and extreme cuts to health care, retirement security, anti-poverty programs, education, infrastructure, and other critical investments are real and will inflict serious harm on American families.”

The farce is that the GOP pretends to be the party of "family values" and "Christian values" yet other than slavishly prostituting itself to hate-filled anti-abortion, anti-gay Christofascists, NOTHING in the GOP agenda is family friendly or remotely in keeping with the Gospel's social message.   

The Paul Ryan Story: From Flimflam to Fascism

Retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan has always pretended to be a good, devout Catholic, true to the Church's teachings, yet throughout his years in Congress he has pursued an agenda that has sought to shred the Church's social gospel and which has unrelentingly sought to harm the poor, the hungry, the sick and the homeless which seeking to shower huge tax cuts and benefits on the very wealthy.  To say that Ryan is a complete hypocrite is beyond an understatement. Of course, he has been in good company with a majority of Republicans who not only ignored the Christian values they claimed to champion but also sold their souls to Donald Trump, perhaps one of the most immoral individuals in America. They were aided in this trashing of morality by evangelical Christians who deserve to be viewed by history as a pestilence on America.  Lastly, they were all aided and abetted by a large portion of the pundit class who always pretended that there was a false equivalency between the ugly agenda of the right and the compassionate agenda of the left.  A column in the New York Times looks at the realty of Paul Ryan.  Here are highlights:

Why did Paul Ryan choose not to run for re-election? What will be the consequences? Your guess is as good as mine . . . On the other hand, I do have some insight into how Ryan — who has always been an obvious con man, to anyone willing to see — came to become speaker of the House. And that’s a story that reflects badly not just on Ryan himself, not just on his party, but also on self-proclaimed centrists and the news media, who boosted his career through their malfeasance.

Incredibly, I’m seeing some news reports about his exit that portray him as a serious policy wonk and fiscal hawk who, sadly, found himself unable to fulfill his mission in the Trump era. Unbelievable.

Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. Can anyone name a single instance in which his supposed concern about the deficit made him willing to impose any burden on the wealthy, in which his supposed compassion made him willing to improve the lives of the poor?

[H]is “deficit reduction” proposals were always frauds. The revenue loss from tax cuts always exceeded any explicit spending cuts, so the pretense of fiscal responsibility came entirely from “magic asterisks”: extra revenue from closing unspecified loopholes, reduced spending from cutting unspecified programs. I called him a flimflam man back in 2010, and nothing he has done since has called that judgment into question.

So how did such an obvious con artist get a reputation for seriousness and fiscal probity? Basically, he was the beneficiary of ideological affirmative action.

Even now, in this age of Trump, there are a substantial number of opinion leaders . . . whose professional brands, rest on the notion that they stand above the political fray. For such people, asserting that both sides have a point, that there are serious, honest people on both left and right, practically defines their identity.

Centrists who couldn’t find real examples of serious, honest conservatives lavished praise on politicians who played that role on TV. Paul Ryan wasn’t actually very good at faking it; true fiscal experts ridiculed his “mystery meat” budgets. But never mind: The narrative required that the character Ryan played exist, so everyone pretended that he was the genuine article.

[T]he same bothsidesism that turned Ryan into a fiscal hero played a crucial role in the election of Donald Trump. How did the most corrupt presidential candidate in American history eke out an Electoral College victory? . . . it wouldn’t have been close if much of the news media hadn’t engaged in an orgy of false equivalence.

[Commentators] also seem shocked at the apparent indifference of Ryan and his colleagues to Trump’s corruption and contempt for the rule of law. What happened to their principles?

The answer, of course, is that the principles they claimed to have never had anything to do with their actual goals. In particular, Republicans haven’t abandoned their concerns about budget deficits, because they never cared about deficits; they only faked concern as an excuse to cut social programs.

[I]f you look at Ryan’s actions, not the character he played to gullible audiences, he has never shown himself willing to sacrifice anything he wants — not one dime — on behalf of his professed principles. Why on earth would you expect him to stick his neck out to defend the rule of law?

So now Ryan is leaving. Good riddance. But hold the celebrations: If he was no better than the rest of his party, he was also no worse. It’s possible that his successor as speaker will show more backbone than he has — but only if that successor is, well, a Democrat.

Trump's Utterly Irresponsible Budget

For all eight years of the presidency of Barack Obama, Republicans whined and moaned about budget deficits yet now between the Trump tax cuts and the budget deal put in place last week, the federal deficit will explode.  Now, making matters worse, Der Trumpenführer has proposed a budget and an infrastructure plan that would savage domestic programs that literally keep many alive, sell of federal properties to rapacious private interests, and cripple states with infrastructure spending.  Meanwhile, the wealthy get richer and richer.  And under public/private infrastructure programs, corporate interest rape much of the public. Locally, the Elizabeth River Tunnels project - a legacy of the McDonnell administration - has shown just how greedy private interests can be as the poor and working class find themselves burdened with crush tolls and penalties that they will never be able to payoff.  Making matters worse, the Commonwealth of Virginia is criminalizing these financially desperate people by refusing to renew auto registrations and subjecting the financially stressed to criminal fines.  One can only speculate the ugliness of such a program taken nationwide.  America seems headed toward a banana republic status save for having a huge military.  An editorial in the Washington Post looks at the troubling picture.  Here are excerpts:  

FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY is the hallmark of populist governance. Whether ideologically left-wing (Hugo Chávez in Venezuela), right-wing (Juan Perón of Argentina) or in between, populists promise prosperity, dismiss trade-offs as so much elitist naysaying and spend their nations’ savings to make FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY is the hallmark of populist governance. Whether ideologically left-wing (Hugo Chávez in Venezuela), right-wing (Juan Perón of Argentina) or in between, populists promise prosperity, dismiss trade-offs as so much elitist naysaying and spend their nations’ savings to make it happen — at least temporarily. The hangover, economic and political, is always painful.

President Trump’s fiscal record so far is very much in the reckless spirit of such erstwhile Latin American strongmen . . . . no nation can defy the laws of fiscal gravity forever; and the president’s own budget planfor fiscal 2019, issued Monday, demonstrates how the margin for financial error is rapidly diminishing.

Thanks to policies pursued by Mr. Trump and the Republican Congress — a massive tax cut, followed last week by legislation to increase federal spending by about $300 billion over the next two years — it has become impossible for the president to forecast a balanced budget by 2027, as he did last year. Instead, it is projected the deficit would still equal more than 1 percent of total economic output in that year, having swollen well above 4 percent in each year of Mr. Trump’s first term. Even those numbers are wildly optimistic, because his budget proposal assumes, unrealistically, that economic output will expand at about a 2.9 percent annual rate over the next decade and that Congress will reduce non-defense discretionary spending 40 percent in the same period, with programs for low-income people bearing most of the cuts.

[W]ith the economy running at or near full employment, a prudent government would stop priming the pump with tax cuts and spending increases and begin adopting long-term fixes to entitlement programs that drive long-term debt. Every dollar Mr. Trump adds to the debt amid today’s prosperity makes it that much more difficult for a future government to respond to future recessions, wars or natural disasters.

[W]hat we have is the antithesis of functional government, if functional government is defined as the establishment of clear public priorities, combined with reasonable measures to fund them. 

What is most telling to me is that the vast majority of evangelical Christians continue to support Trump even as his policies demonstrate that he views the poor and needy elderly as little more than disposable garbage that should be left to die.  What we are seeing is also the antithesis of the Gospel message that the Republican base bloviates about and then disregards.  

The Fraudulence of the GOP "Fiscal Conservatives"

One of the excuses that some "friends" and neighbors give for voting Republican is that they believe in "fiscal conservatism."  Apparently, it's more palatable to them than admitting that they are racists, right wing Christian extremists, and/or homophobes or some combination of the foregoing.  How these folks will try to cling to that disingenuous excuse will be interesting now that Republicans have greatly increased America's budget deficit through a combination of the Trump/GOP tax cuts and the budget passed in the early hours of Friday morning.  Of course, that doesn't even include the fact that since Reagan forward, budget deficits balloon under Republicans and shrink in relative terms under Democrats. A column in the New York Times looks at the utter lie that the GOP is the party of fiscal conservatism.  Here are highlights:

In 2011, House Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, issued a report full of dire warnings about the dangers of budget deficits. “The United States is facing a crushing burden of debt,” it declared, warning of a looming fiscal crisis that might soon “capsize” the economy. Citing the horrors of big deficits, Republicans refused to raise the federal debt ceiling, threatening to create financial turmoil and effectively blackmailing President Barack Obama into cutting spending on domestic programs.

How big were these horrifying deficits? In the 2012 fiscal year the federal deficit was $1.09 trillion. Much of this deficit, however, was a direct result of a depressed economy, which held down revenues and increased outlays on unemployment benefits and other safety-net programs. The deficit fell rapidly over the next few years as the economy recovered.

This week Republicans, having just enacted a huge tax cut, cheerfully agreed to a budget deal that, according to independent experts, will push next year’s deficit up to around $1.15 trillion — bigger than in 2012. Wait, it gets worse. In 2012 there were strong economic reasons to run budget deficits. The economy was still suffering the aftereffects of the 2008 financial crisis. Unemployment was around 8 percent. And the Federal Reserve, which normally takes the lead in fighting slumps, had very limited ammunition . . . . The state of the economy in 2012 was exactly the kind of situation in which running budget deficits is actually a good thing, because they help sustain overall spending. By contrast, there is no comparable case for deficits now, with the economy near full employment and the Fed raising interest rates to head off potential inflation. If anything, we should be using this time of relatively full employment to pay down debt, or at least reduce it relative to G.D.P. “The boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity at the Treasury,” wrote John Maynard Keynes. But Republicans have turned that sage advice on its head. [L]et’s be serious: Their [the GOP's] views haven’t changed at all. They never really cared about debt and deficits; it was a fraud all along. All that has changed is the fact that a Republican now sits in the White House. How do we know Republicans were never sincere about the deficit? It was obvious, even at the time, to anyone who looked at their fiscal proposals. These proposals always involved giant tax cuts for the wealthy — funny how that worked — offset by savage cuts in social benefits. Even so, assertions that deficits would go down depended entirely on assuming lots of revenue from closing unspecified loopholes and huge savings from cutting unspecified government programs. In other words, even at the peak of their deficit-hawk posturing, all Republicans really had to offer was redistribution from the poor to the rich. However, pretending to care about the deficit served several useful political purposes. It was a way to push for cuts in social programs. It was also a way to hobble Obama’s presidency.

And I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that there was an element of deliberate economic sabotage. . . . . Now Obama is gone, and suddenly deficits don’t matter.

But let me not just bash Republicans. Let me also bash their enablers — all those who were duped into believing their claims to be deficit hawks, or pretended to believe them in order to appear balanced and bipartisan. Such people did America a great disservice.

And they will continue to do a great disservice if they obscure what’s happening now. . . . this is all about Republican bad faith. Everything they said about budgets, every step of the way, was fraudulent. And nobody should believe anything they say now.

New Trump Budget Hits His Own Voters and the Poor Hardest

The proposed Trump/Pence regime budget released today follows through on past GOP priorities: massive cuts to social safety net programs such as food stamps, aid for the disabled, and the working poor while granting huge (obscene might be the more appropriate word) tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.   Stated another way, Trump wants the wealthy to enjoy an even more self-centered and opulent life style while the poor and poorly paid working class citizens are literally left to die.   It is the antithesis of the Gospel message that Republicans and the pathological liar who goes by the name of Donald Trump falsely claim to honor.  And it is critical to remember that this is the agenda that 81% of evangelical Christians voted for.  The lies, hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy are all off the charts.  I cannot help but ask: where are the supposedly "good Christians"?  Why don't we see them loudly opposing, protesting and denouncing these budget cuts?   Lastly, why don't we see Trump voters opening their eyes and realizing that they have been played for fools and been betrayed?  They feel like lemmings to Trumps call to racism and white supremacy.  A piece in Politico looks at this reprehensible proposed budget.  Here are article highlights:

Donald Trump, whose populist message and promises to help American workers propelled him to the White House, issued a budget proposal on Tuesday that instead takes aim at the social safety net on which many of his supporters rely.

Rather than breaking with Washington precedent, Trump’s spending blueprint follows established conservative orthodoxy, cutting taxes on the wealthy, boosting defense spending and taking a hatchet to programs for the poor and disabled – potentially hurting many of the rural and low-income Americans who voted him into office.

The president’s budget plan calls for more than $1 trillion in cuts to a wide range of social programs with millions of beneficiaries, from farm subsidies to federal student aid. That includes a $600 billion cut to Medicaid over 10 years, despite Trump’s repeated promises on the campaign trail not to cut the program. The budget also takes an ax to the federal food stamp program and Social Security Disability Insurance.

Trump also proposes some of the deepest cuts to agriculture subsidies since Ronald Reagan, squeezing out nearly $50 billion over 10 years.

Trump’s budget would drastically cut domestic programs controlled by Congress, slashing $1.7 trillion over 10 years. At the end of the decade, the U.S. would spend nearly twice as much on defense as on other domestic programs. Domestic discretionary spending would be capped at $429 billion per year, below 2004 levels, while military spending soars to $722 billion.

There’s a certain philosophy wrapped up in the budget and that is — we are no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs or the number of people on those programs,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, one of the budget’s chief architects, told reporters on Monday.

Mulvaney rejected accusations that Trump’s budget unfairly targets the poor, arguing instead that it amounts to a broad rethink of the country’s welfare system.  “We need folks to work. We need people to go to work. If you’re on food stamps, and you're able-bodied, we need you to go to work. If you’re on disability insurance and you're not supposed to be, we need you to work,” he added.  . . . . Mulvaney said the budget does not touch “mainline” or “core” Social Security, but it does cut Social Security’s disability insurance.

Trump’s budget would tighten the belt on programs for low-income families ranging from cash assistance to the child tax credit. Nearly $200 billion in cuts will come directly from the federal food stamp program, which helps feed 44 million people each year.

Trump would also slash $72 billion by tightening the rules for programs for people with disabilities — programs that Trump’s advisers have described as riddled with fraud and abuse.
Democrats vowed on Tuesday to ensure that the GOP pays a political price for the massive social safety-net cuts in Trump's budget, regardless of whether Congress follows through on enacting them.
“If I’m a Republican member of the House, do you really think I’m looking forward to going home to whatever state I came from to say, ‘Yeah, I just voted for incredibly large tax breaks for billionaires. Oh, by the way, we’re going to cut Head Start and child care and after-school programs and health care and education’?" Bernie Sanders, the senior Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, asked reporters.
“I’m deeply concerned about the severity of the domestic cuts,” Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), a long-time member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, told POLITICO on Friday.
Rogers has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s proposed cuts to programs that benefit rural regions like his home state, like the Appalachian Regional Commission.
“I think we do need healthcare reform. I think we do need welfare reform. But the kinds of reductions that he’s talking about go exactly against the states that brought [Trump] to the dance, so to speak,” said G. William Hoagland, a former long-time Republican Senate budget aide.

Today's GOP: America Has Never Seen a Political PartyLess Caring

Just this week Der Trumpenführer has signed executive orders and directed minions to take actions that will trash the environment, erase LGBT citizens from the 2020 census, rescind non-discrimination protections, and reduce safety regulations.  And this follows last week's thankfully failed attempt to throw 24 million Americans off of healthcare insurance and budget cut proposals that would slash the social safety net. Yet the Republican Party farcically continues to claim that it is the party of Christian values even as its agenda and the seething hatred of much of its base towards others make the biblical Pharisees look like a combination of Mother Theresa and generous philanthropists.  What is stunning is the fact that the GOP wasn't always this way.  Indeed, not to sound like a broken record, the party was not so cruel and, in my view evil, until its base was hijacked by Christian fundamentalists, a large portion of whom (if not a majority) are racists.  Yes, this is a harsh statement, but if one looks at leaders of the so-called "family values" organizations, these groups are lily white and beneath the surface there is a strong current of racism and white supremacy.  Here in Virginia, The Family Foundation traces its roots to the proponents of segregation and "Massive Resistance." At the national level, individuals like Tony Perkins of Family Research Council has open ties to white supremacy groups.  Having seen the rise of these factions in the GOP prior to my leaving the party and having watched the rot that has occurred since, this element of the GOP based bears much of the blame.  Throw in the Koch brothers and those who want to rob the poor to benefit the rich and one gets an ugly and toxic result.  An op-ed in The Guardian looks at the horror that today's Republican Party has become.  Here are excerpts:

Last week I was taking an Uber (I know, I’m sorry, it was a necessity) across an unfamiliar town when the driver, whom I’ll call Randy, started telling me about this cool dude named Jesus. Randy’s big opener, earlier in the ride, was to gesture at a homeless man panhandling by the side of the road and say: “Isn’t it terrible?”

“Yeah,” I agreed, though I was unsure whether he was referring to homelessness as a blight or a form of state violence. “I can’t believe my tax money pays for the president’s golf vacations while people are freezing to death on the street. It’s robbery.”

At least Randy cared about that homeless guy, though, which is more than I can say for the Republican party.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of “care” lately. Care can be florid and romantic or bureaucratic and dry; it is maintenance and stewardship and only sometimes love. You can take care of something without personally caring about it, which is precisely what we pay our elected officials to do: take care of our communities and our planet, whether or not you share our priorities and fears and weaknesses and religions and sexual orientations and gender identities and skin colours. We put ourselves and our money in your hands. Take care.

I don’t know that America has ever seen a political party so divested of care. Since Trump took office, Republicans have proposed legislation to destroy unions, the healthcare system, the education system and the Environmental Protection Agency; to defund the reproductive health charity Planned Parenthood and restrict abortion; to stifle public protest and decimate arts funding; to increase the risk of violence against trans people and roll back anti-discrimination laws; and to funnel more and more wealth from the poorest to the richest. Every executive order and piece of GOP legislation is destructive, aimed at dismantling something else, never creating anything new, never in the service of improving the care of the nation.

That void at the heart of the party, that loss of any tether to humanity, is breeding anxiety on both sides of the political divide. According to the Atlantic, Florida Republican Tom Rooney recently turned on his cohort with surprising lucidity: “I’ve been in this job eight years and I’m racking my brain to think of one thing our party has done that’s been something positive, that’s been something other than stopping something else from happening. We need to start having victories as a party. And if we can’t, then it’s hard to justify why we should be back here.”

In the wake of the Republican party’s luscious, succulent failure to obliterate the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and replace it with catastrophic nationwide poverty and death, an old video of a Paul Ryan gaffe went viral. “We’re not going to give up,” Ryan assures his audience, “on destroying the healthcare system for the American people.” 

The clip is from 2013, not 2017, and obviously Ryan did not mean to say into a microphone that he wants to destroy the healthcare system. But here’s the thing. I talk into a microphone in front of people all the time, and not once have I ever accidentally said: “Hitler was pretty cool” when what I meant to say was: “Throw all Nazis into the sea”. Even if we acknowledge that such a slip of the tongue is technically possible (if not likely), we don’t actually need to wonder about what Ryan secretly believes. Gaffe or no, we already know he wants to destroy the healthcare system for the American people, because he tried to pass legislation that would destroy the healthcare system for the American people. And because destruction, not life, is the foundation of Ryan’s party.

I truly do not know how decent, moral people can continue to support the Republican Party.  Those that I know who do, like to see themselves as decent, informed people.  Yet, most are highly uninformed - Fox News brainwashing should be categorized as a clinical condition - and if pressed either cannot support their positions or end up agreeing with liberal positions.  I truly do not comprehend the desire to "be a conservative" when conservatism as represented by today's GOP is something so abhorrent.  As for the "godly folk" who comprise the GOP's care base, they are such hate-filled and hypocrisy-filled people, that I no longer even want to call myself a Christian because the connotation has become so negative.  Witness the under 30 generations, a third of whom have walked away from religion.  I am hardly alone.

Trumpcare vs. Obamacare: Apocalypse Foretold

Not to beat a dead horse, but the CBO analysis of the impact of the GOP's "Trumpcare" proposal underscores the reality that today's GOP cares nothing about the majority of Americans.  Everything that the GOP does is aimed at one thing: tax cuts for the wealthy.  They claim to want to cut the deficit, but there's an easy solution to that issue: increase taxes on the obscenely wealthy.  Sadly, as long as the GOP controls the Congress and the White House, this will never happen. Worse yet, the GOP lead by Paul Ryan is out to gut Social Security and Medicare.  In short, the GOP goal is to destroy the social safety net and make wealth disparity even worse than it all ready is - the USA is now much like the banana republics of the 1950's where the masses will suffer while the wealthy live even more opulently.  A column in the New York Times looks at this reality that anyone sentient and not blinded by Fox News and other fake news sites should have seen coming.  The surprise is that anyone is surprised by the CBO's projections.  Here are column excerpts:

The Congressional Budget Office report on Trumpcare is out, and it’s devastating: 14 million people losing insurance in the first year, 24 million over time, with premiums soaring for older, lower-income Americans — in many cases, the very people who went strongly for President Trump. The C.B.O. thinks it would reduce the deficit, but only marginally, around $30 billion a year in a $19 trillion economy.

Let me offer one assertion and ask two questions.

The assertion is that something like this was to be expected. The C.B.O. came in even worse on coverage than most predicted, but it was obvious that the news would be terrible because that’s what the logic of the situation told us. Obamacare imposes a mandate to induce healthy people to sign up, offers means-tested subsidies to make insurance affordable and expands Medicaid to take care of people with really low incomes. Trumpcare eliminates the mandate, slashes subsidies overall and redirects them to those who don’t need them and sharply cuts Medicaid. Of course that leads to a huge drop in coverage.

Republican claims that they could do much better even while slashing funding so they could cut taxes on the rich were always obvious nonsense.

Now my questions: First, can this legislation still go through? I have learned never to underestimate the cravenness of Republican “moderates,” who may posture to the center but almost always cave to the hard right when it matters. But even so, it’s hard to imagine this act of cruelty getting 50 senators.

Second, what were Republican leaders thinking? Something like this C.B.O. score was a foregone conclusion; would it really have mattered much if it were 15 million losing insurance, not 24 million? How was this supposed to work out politically?

Again, I wouldn’t count out the possibility that this law will be rammed through regardless, with budget analyses relegated to the category of fake news. Democrats might even want to hope that this happens, so that there is no question about who to blame if insurance collapses. But the lemming-like way Republicans rushed into this disaster is still amazing.

New Year's Day Reflections

Perhaps it's because I was up until nearly 3:00 am after hosting friends at our home last night and then had someone ring the door bell at 8:00 am setting the dogs off into barking mania.  Or perhaps it's because the weather is overcast and dreary.  More likely, the nightmare that will occur on January 20, 2017, continues to haunt me. In any event, I cannot remember a New Year's day on which I have had such a sense of foreboding and sense of impending calamity.  I sincerely hope that I am wrong, but I fear that 2017 will see the end of America as most of us have known it as Trumpism and neo-fascism are ascendant.  

Yes, last night's party was fun to an extent and it was nice to have numerous friends and neighbors gathered in our home, but as the clock struck midnight, I found it very, very difficult to say "Happy New Year."  I felt as if it was forced gaiety, at least on my part.  Not that I don't wish much happiness in 2017 to my family and friends.  I just fear that whatever good and happiness comes, it will be overshadowed by the continuing national tragedy as the Founding Father's republic dies.  Not all at, once by step by step as  Trump and Congressional Republicans destroy the social safety net, roll back the rights of many, LGBT Americans and minorities being particularly targeted.  History will no doubt find it ironic that the Electoral College that was supposed to be the fail safe measure to protect the nation was in fact what guaranteed the republic's death.

We have a drag brunch at 1:00 pm that we will be attending at a friend's restaurant.  Hopefully, it wall be a distraction from the gloom and foreboding that I feel.  At least there won't be many Trump voters in attendance, which, of course, will be a good thing. I am definitely not in the mood to be even remotely civil to such people today. 

To all my readers, I wish you a Happy New Year.  I hope for the best for all of us.  Meanwhile, if nothing else, the coming reign of Der Fuhrer will certainly give me plenty to write about.  

Trump’s Unpopularity Threatens His Presidency

If there is any good news to be found as the prospect of "President Trump" gets closer to becoming a reality it is the fact that his widespread unpopularity may hamper his ability to enact his agenda - whatever it might actually be.  Yes, the Republican controlled Congress will move forward on many heinous and dangerous plans, but in the end the fact that Trump received votes from less than a 27% of registered voters and lost the popular vote could come back to haunt him.  Despite his rhetoric and that of his sycophants, he has no mandate.  Not factored into the piece is the reality that much of the Congressional GOP's agenda will prove catastrophic for many Trump supporters who, hopefully, will figure out that they have been betrayed and seek revenge on the GOP in future elections.  A piece in Politico looks at reality even if Trump will not.  Here are excerpts:

President-elect Donald Trump will descend on Washington next month, buoyed by his upset victory and Republican control of Congress to implement his agenda.

But he’s facing a major obstacle: Trump will enter the White House as the least-popular incoming president in the modern era of public-opinion polling.

The down-in-the-dumps figures raise hard questions about whether he’ll have the political capital needed to push through his more controversial nominees and his aggressive legislative goals of repealing Obamacare, passing a major infrastructure spending plan and reforming immigration and tax policies.

On Election Day, just 38 percent of voters had a favorable opinion of Trump, compared to 60 percent who viewed him unfavorably — unheard of for a presidential-election victor.

Trump’s persistent and deep unpopularity – combined with the fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million ballots – means he lacks the potent argument that the will of the people are behind his agenda.

“He’s clearly not doing as well as other presidents-elect,” said GOP pollster David Winston, a long-time adviser to Republican leaders in both the House and Senate. “We’ve never had a president-elect that had more unfavorables than favorables. He’s started in a pretty big hole in terms of favorables.”

And even though Democrats are in the minority in both chambers of Congress — Republicans will control 241 of 435 House seats and 52 out of 100 Senate seats — the party sees an opening in Trump’s poor poll standing.

“The lack of support for the president-elect means that Democrats can oppose him when they believe they should,” said Jesse Ferguson, the former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee independent-expenditure head who worked as a spokesman for Clinton’s campaign this year. “They can be confident that there’s no pressure for them to support him out of fear of his political prowess and political power, because his coattails look a little more like a T-SHIRT.”

The outlook for Trump’s nominees is generally positive, but some have already caused agitation not only among Democrats but also among his fellow Republicans. The loudest intra-party dissent has come in reaction to Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, who has extensive ties with Russia. That has raised the ire of Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), two notable Russia hawks.

While both chambers of Congress appear daunting for Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections – given the cycle’s Senate map and House districts that favor the GOP every two years – Ferguson said voters who backed Trump in this year’s election can flip if they don’t approve of his job performance two years from now.

That raises the stakes for Trump and the congressional GOP’s first months next year, Winston said. Voters sent a clear message on Election Day: They are eager for action, and they aren’t afraid to rock the boat again in the next election.

“[Voters] want to see things get done,” he added. “Members understand that. They understand that the ball’s now in their court, and they’re going to have to put points on the board. The electorate is looking for things to happen pretty quickly here.”

GOP Plan to Destroy America’s Safety Net and to Kill Democracy

On Christmas day it is also important to recognize the war that Donald Trump and the Republican Party plan to relaunch against the middle and working classes.  Yes, the GOP claims that it is the champion of "Christian values," but as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. The irony, of course, is that Donald Trump voters - other than the wealthy - will me among those most harmed by the Trump/GOP agenda.   The evangelicals who voted for Trump will learn a harsh lesson as to how the GOP's prosperity gospel does not and never truly did include them.  What is sad is that the 70% plus of Americans who did not vote for Trump will suffer as well.  A piece in Salon looks at the toxic plan that will roll out early next year.  Here are excerpts:

Newt Gingrich openly bragged recently at the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were going to “break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model.”  That “model,” of course, created what we today refer to as “the middle class.”

Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been working overtime to kneecap institutions that support the American middle class. And, as any working-class family can tell you, the GOP has had some substantial successes, particularly in shifting both income and political power away from voters and towards billionaires and transnational corporations.

In July of last year, discussing SCOTUS’s 5/4 conservative vote on Citizens United, President Jimmy Carter told me: “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” He added: “[W]e’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

As Princeton researchers Gilens and Page demonstrated in an exhaustive analysis of the difference between what most Americans want their politicians to do legislatively, versus what American politicians actually do, it’s pretty clear that President Carter was right.

They found that while the legislative priorities of the top 10 percent of Americans are consistently made into law, things the bottom 90 percent want are ignored. In other words, today in America, democracy only “works” for the top 10 percent of Americans.

For thousands of years, economists and economic observers from Aristotle to Adam Smith to Thomas Picketty have told us that a “middle class” is not a normal by-product of raw, unregulated capitalism — what right-wing ideologues call “the free market.”

Instead, unregulated markets — particularly markets not regulated by significant taxation on predatory incomes — invariably lead to the opposite of a healthy middle class: They produce extremes of inequality, which are as dangerous to democracy as cancer is to a living being.

With so-called “unregulated free markets,” the rich become super-rich, while grinding poverty spreads among working people like a heroin epidemic.

Smith noted, in 1759, that, “All constitutions of government are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end.”

Jefferson was acutely aware of this: The Declaration of Independence was the first founding document of any nation in the history of the world that explicitly declared “happiness” as a “right” that should be protected and promoted by government.

That was not at all, however, a consideration for the architects of supply-side Reaganomics, although they appropriated JFK’s “rising tide lifts all boats” metaphor to sell their hustle to (boatless) working people.

A 30-year-old in the 1970s had a 90 percent chance of having or attaining a higher standard of living than his or her parents. But, since the 1980s introduction of Reaganomics, there’s been more than a 70-percent drop in “social mobility” — the ability to move from one economic station of life into a better one.

So, if our democratic republic is to return to democracy and what’s left of our middle class is to survive (or even grow), how do we do that?

History shows that the two primary regulators within a capitalist system that provide for the emergence of a middle class are progressive taxation and a healthy social safety net.

As Jefferson noted in a 1785 letter to Madison, “Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”

Tragically, Republicans are today planning to destroy both our nation’s progressive taxation system and our social safety net, in obsequious service to their billionaire paymasters.

Flipping Jefferson and FDR on their heads, Republicans are proposing multi-million-dollar tax breaks for the rich, with a few-hundred-dollars bone tossed in for working people.

Meanwhile, Republicans are already hard at work.

As Ian Milheiser notes, “Republicans in the House hope to cut Social Security benefits by 20 to 50 percent. Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to voucherize Medicare would drive up out-of-pocket costs for seniors by about 40 percent. Then he’d cut Medicaid by between a third and a half.”

If Gingrich, Ryan, et al succeed in destroying FDR’s legacy programs, not only will the bottom 90 percent of Americans suffer, but what little democracy we have left in this republic will evaporate, and history suggests it will probably be replaced by a violent, kleptocratic oligarchy.

 Our only hope is that at some point the working and middle class voters who voted for Trump and Republicans wake up to their betrayal quickly and stop falling for GOP appeals to their racism, religious extremism, and general bigotry and hatred of those who are "other."

Seduced and Betrayed by Donald Trump

One of the big questions in the wake of the 2016 presidential election is how long it will take for the millions of low information, working class white voters to realize that both Trump and the Republican Party played them for fools with no intention of curing the ills that they believe afflict them and their future.  Succumbing to appeals to their own racism, xenophobia and nativism, these voters ultimately ignored their own best economic interest and put in office a team that will strive to give more and more to the wealthy and large corporations while shredding the social safety net and leaving these voters much worse off.  Yes, in the short term they may feel smug and superior and better about themselves as they look down on blacks, Hispanics, non-whites, non-Christians, and, of course, LGBT American, but down the road they themselves will be the biggest losers.  A column in the New York Times looks at this said tale of trickery and votes cast based on resentment rather than logic.  Do I have sympathy for these voters?  Candidly, no, none whatsoever. Given the base motives that ultimately motivated them, they deserve whatever misfortunes that may befall them.  After all, it will all have been self inflicted.   Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump won the Electoral College (though not the popular vote) on the strength of overwhelming support from working-class whites, who feel left behind by a changing economy and society. And they’re about to get their reward — the same reward that, throughout Mr. Trump’s career, has come to everyone who trusted his good intentions. Think Trump University.

Yes, the white working class is about to be betrayed.

The evidence of that coming betrayal is obvious in the choice of an array of pro-corporate, anti-labor figures for key positions. In particular, the most important story of the week — seriously, people, stop focusing on Trump Twitter — was the selection of Tom Price, an ardent opponent of Obamacare and advocate of Medicare privatization, as secretary of health and human services. This choice probably means that the Affordable Care Act is doomed — and Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters will be among the biggest losers.

The first thing you need to understand here is that Republican talk of “repeal and replace” has always been a fraud. The G.O.P. has spent six years claiming that it will come up with a replacement for Obamacare any day now; the reason it hasn’t delivered is that it can’t.

Obamacare looks the way it does because it has to: You can’t cover Americans with pre-existing conditions without requiring healthy people to sign up, and you can’t do that without subsidies to make insurance affordable.

Any replacement will either look a lot like Obamacare, or take insurance away from millions who desperately need it.

What the choice of Mr. Price suggests is that the Trump administration is, in fact, ready to see millions lose insurance. And many of those losers will be Trump supporters. . . . . we’re probably looking at more than five million Trump supporters, many of whom have chronic health problems and recently got health insurance for the first time, who just voted to make their lives nastier, more brutish, and shorter.

Why did they do it? They may not have realized that their coverage was at stake — over the course of the campaign, the news media barely covered policy at all. Or they may have believed Mr. Trump’s assurances that he would replace Obamacare with something great.

Either way, they’re about to receive a rude awakening, which will get even worse once Republicans push ahead with their plans to end Medicare as we know it, which seem to be on even though the president-elect had promised specifically that he would do no such thing.

And just in case you’re wondering, no, Mr. Trump can’t bring back the manufacturing jobs that have been lost over the past few decades. Those jobs were lost mainly to technological change, not imports, and they aren’t coming back.

There will be nothing to offset the harm workers suffer when Republicans rip up the safety net.

Will there be a political backlash, a surge of buyer’s remorse? Maybe. Certainly Democrats will be well advised to hammer Mr. Trump’s betrayal of the working class nonstop. But we do need to consider the tactics that he will use to obscure the scope of his betrayal.

One tactic, . . . will be to distract the nation with bright, shiny, trivial objects. True, this tactic will work only if news coverage is both gullible and innumerate. . . . . But judging from the coverage of the deal so far, assuming that the news media will be gullible and innumerate seems like a good bet.

And if and when the reality that workers are losing ground starts to sink in, I worry that the Trumpists will do what authoritarian governments often do to change the subject away from poor performance: go find an enemy.

Remember what I said about Trump Twitter. Even as he took a big step toward taking health insurance away from millions, Mr. Trump started ranting about taking citizenship away from flag-burners. This was not a coincidence.

The point is to keep your eye on what’s important. Millions of Americans have just been sucker-punched. They just don’t know it yet.

I always advise clients that they must put logic over emotion when making both business decisions or decisions to institute lawsuits.  Following emotion may feel good, but often the result is disastrous. Trump voters chose to go with emotion as opposed to logic and reason. Now they deserve to pay a very high price.